


oblivion is calling out your name

by inkteardrops



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Afterlife, Alive Vernon Boyd & Erica Reyes, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Character Death, Developing Relationship, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Ghosts, Hale-McCall Pack, Happy Ending, Happy Pack, M/M, Mystery, Pack Bonding, Pack Feels, Rebuilt Hale House
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-10
Updated: 2014-11-10
Packaged: 2018-02-24 21:22:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2596850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkteardrops/pseuds/inkteardrops
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Stiles Stilinski trips down the stairs five days before his eighteenth birthday and breaks his neck.</i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>  <i>One month later, Cora Hale lies back on the forest floor watching the trees above slowly fade to whiteness and feeling her body go back to nature, the last surviving member of the Beacon Hills pack.</i></p>
<p><i>She closes her eyes when oblivion hits.</i><br/>—Something has been clawing at the pack one by one and they have the rest of eternity to come to peace with it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	oblivion is calling out your name

**Author's Note:**

> Why do I only write ridiculously morbid things that involve me killing off my favourite character in the opening line? I have no clue why, but I do know that it sucks. 
> 
> There is a happy ending, I promise you folks. 
> 
> Pretty much complete canon divergence after S2 – Jackson/Cora/Isaac/Danny stay and Erica/Boyd/Allison don’t die. I may have also tweaked some other characters’ fates – Peter dies at some point during the S3 timeline and both Alpha twins die. In this universe, the Alpha pack does come to town and Jennifer Blake is a thing, but they’re defeated a lot more successfully and the Nogitsune doesn’t exist. 
> 
> Title taken from ‘Oblivion’, by Bastille.

Stiles trips down the stairs five days before his eighteenth birthday and breaks his neck.

Lydia awakes from a nap screaming his name and the werewolves rush home from training to find his lifeless, stone-cold body sprawled at the foot of his stairs, his eyes blankly staring at the opposite wall: seeing nothing forevermore.

On the way back from his funeral a week later, the car that Jackson, Lydia and Danny are in collides with a truck on the highway and is engulfed in flames.

It’s too fast for even werewolf Jackson to survive and this time, Lydia doesn’t see her own death coming. So they perish in the accident; the child of the moon, the bringer of death and the boy with the means of finding out _everything_ become just three more casualties of dangerous driving in America.

Allison has a heart attack in the woods three days later and it kills her instantaneously.

The doctors can’t explain _how_ someone so healthy could have been hit by something like this so suddenly, but put it down to faulty genetics,

An electrical fault at the McCall house leads to it burning down to the ground whilst Melissa is on shift, yet Isaac and Scott sleep on soundlessly in their respective rooms, completely sated by the sleeping pills they’d been taking to ease the nightmares. They don’t even stir when the flames start to lick at their ceilings.

Two more werewolves suffocate to death in a burning building.

A rogue hunter embeds a Wolfsbane bullet into Derek’s heart and he chokes out a strangled “sorry” before he hits the ground at Cora’s feet.

They’ll never know what he’s sorry for.

The day after Derek, Erica and Boyd are at school, clearing out Stiles’ and Scott’s and Lydia’s and Jackson’s and Danny’s and Isaac’s lockers and trying to ignore the fact that ninety percent of their friends are dead.

They wander out on to the lacrosse field and sit where they used to cheer the pack on during games try to remember a happier time, when the bleachers collapse in on themselves and crush them in an instant.

Even werewolves can’t cheat death when it’s _that_ fast.

Cora outlived the fire and outlives every single one of her family. But she can’t outlive whatever it is that is clawing at the Hale pack, slowly taking them out one by one.

She is the last one left and even though at Derek’s death, her eyes had flickered red and her body had never been more powerful, she’s never felt more vulnerable.

But she is Cora Hale and she has survived the fire that killed her family and she survived the Alpha pack and she survived watching her last remaining family member drop dead at her feet, so the universe is damned if it doesn’t think she’s going out with a fight.

Sadly, she doesn’t quite get the opportunity to fight like she promises herself she will. A feral omega steps onto Hale territory and slices his claws through her skin before she’s even turned around.

She does get a chance to battle at the very end, though. As Cora lies on the forest floor where Laura met her end all those years ago, she watches the trees slowly fade away into whiteness and feels herself going back to the Earth, as her blood seeps down into the soil below.

She wonders if she’ll see everyone again on the other side. She hopes she will.

She closes her eyes when oblivion hits.

.

When Cora opens them again, she’s sat in her favourite armchair in her renovated childhood home, the pack all around her and the evening sunlight refracting off the walls.

“Cora,” Derek says, pulling her to his healed chest and she breathes in the familiar scent of brother and family and pack and safety and _home_.

She looks around at the pack and she notes how Derek’s chest is unmarked by black blood; Stiles eyes roam around the room once more; Scott and Isaac aren’t choking on the air around them; Erica and Boyd are whole again; Allison’s heart is still beating in her ribcage; Jackson, Lydia and Danny are no longer burnt out and lifeless.  She looks down at her own body, and she can’t see the claw marks or the blood that ended her life.

“Am I… are we… dead?” she asks questioningly, as she can hear her own heartbeat and it’s as strong as ever and everyone around her looks so _whole_ and youthful again that she can’t quite believe they’re dead.

“Yeah,” Stiles says sadly, keeping his eyes on the tips of the trees that are bathed in golden just outside the window, “we’re not sure where we are though. The pack house, obviously. But other than that? Nada. Maybe heaven? Or purgatory?”

“This can’t be heaven,” Lydia reasons, her eyes alight with the curiosity that had so often graced her face, back when she was alive, “we’ve only seen each other. If it was heaven or whatever, Stiles would have met his Mom and Derek and you would’ve seen the rest of your family and Jackson would have seen his parents and Boyd his little sister. I’d actually say that I don’t think we’ve passed on yet – when some of us were still alive, we could faintly hear you talking and we actually saw a couple of you whenever you came into this room and all over the rest of the house. Which we can’t leave, by the way.”

“It’s been weird,” Danny continues, “Stiles fell and he says that he was trapped in the house and didn’t really have any sense of what was going on and was really disorientated and then, we all started turning up one by one.”

Cora nods her head, taking this all in. She casts her eyes around her assembled family and wonders how every single one of them died within a month. The chances of that happening have to be near impossible, surely.

She voices this thought and is met with a room full of saddened, yet curious looks.

“It must be impossible, right?” Allison says, from her seat on the sofa in Scott’s lap, “I mean, everyone says that the doctors were completely at a loss as to why I died and blamed it on a hereditary condition. Not a single one of my family members has died from a heart attack and I am- I _was_ fit and healthy and young and my heart shouldn’t have just stopped.”

“It’s almost like it was planned,” Isaac pipes up, “Scott or I should have woken up when we heard the fire. We have supernatural strength for God’s sake – but it just so happened that we were both on a dosage of sleeping pills so high it would have been lethal for a human. It just so happened that Melissa was out and didn’t notice.”

“The bleachers shouldn’t have collapsed,” Boyd says, “they were new – I remember them being put in only a year ago and I couldn’t smell any kind of rot or rust or _anything_.”

“I didn’t even feel my own death coming,” Lydia says sadly.

“That omega shouldn’t have been on Hale territory, let alone have killed its protector,” Cora says softly, realisation creeping into her voice.

“That’s how you went?” Erica says sympathetically, “dying really does suck.”

“That’s the thing,” Scott says, eyebrows creasing together, “we all died in ways that could have been completely passable. Natural. Unnoticeable, if not for the proximity. My house really could have caught fire and Jackson’s car could flip and Derek could have been killed by a hunter.”  
  
“And Stilinski could very, very easily fall from tripping over. It’s a wonder it didn’t happen before, really,” Jackson remarks, his eyes shining with mirth.

“Too soon, dude, too soon,” Stiles shoots back, but his shoulders are relaxed a wide grin splits his face.

Soon, the whole room is ringing with laughter and Cora can feel herself quaking and it’s weird because she’s dead, they’re all dead and they’re not coming back, but she hasn’t feel this light since she saw Stiles’ corpse at the bottom of the stairs. This happy. Youthful. Carefree.

She glances round the room and thinks that maybe; just maybe death won’t be so bleak with these guys by her side.

.

They get through death.

Of course, it’s hard because it’s not as if dying too young and leaving your family behind is _easy_ to live through. But, they have each other and they’re in the house where most of them spent some of their happiest days, so it’s better than nothing.

After his years of silent loneliness in BHHS cafeteria, Boyd guesses he’s good at observing. He’s good at spotting what people are hiding and relationships blossom and curiosity spike. He’s had so much practise of witnessing his classmates do just that, that it’s practically second nature to him.

So, he wanders through the house and he watches.

He watches how Stiles sobs over leaving his father behind and how Derek places a comforting hand on his shoulder and talks through the misery to him and brings him out of his shell of gloom through promising words and well placed smiles. Whenever Derek speaks, Boyd gets an inexplicable sense of déjà vu of seeing _Stiles_ coaxing Derek out of his own aura of self-hatred and grief through pack nights and jokes. Boyd wonders how they’ve all missed it: the boy who runs with wolves and the boy who runs with the moon slowly mending one another. 

He watches them grow closer by the day.

He watches how Cora stands by the massive windows of the sitting room, to the woods that she spent her whole life living with and her death being at peace with. He watches how her smile is saddened and her face lined with longing, as she wishes she could run and jump and swoop through the trees like she spent her childhood doing.

He watches how Isaac wanders the house aimlessly, feeling trapped and claustrophobic and wishing he could breathe in the air above him. He’d spent a childhood grappling with the feeling of being caged-in and it isn’t fair that he has the rest of eternity to be caged into another home.

Cora takes his hand and tells him they’ll break free. Isaac holds her against his chest and tells her that at least they have each other.

They become each other’s escape.

He sees how Lydia lies on the floor in the library, flicking through books at lightning pace, trying to figure out how and why they’re all trapped here and what exactly they are. Her eyes are alight with curiosity and a thirst for knowledge, and it’s almost as if she’s alive again and Boyd is watching her from across the cafeteria all those years ago as she struggles to hide the passion and _fire_ within her beneath a layer of lipstick.

Jackson mutters in her ear about being by one another’s side for the rest of time. He whispers that it isn’t too bad a punishment. Lydia kisses him and tells him that she’s in heaven as it is, she doesn’t need the pearly gates or the clouds when she has him.

Boyd sees how Danny takes to pacing the hallway, his heartbeat erratic and his scent of misery. Boyd knows what he’s thinking, he’s thinking of Ethan and how he thought that they’d get to reunite. He’s thinking of how both of the twins were murdered by Jennifer without even getting to say goodbye.

But then, Boyd watches as Danny turns his face as Stiles claps him on the shoulder and Lydia leans against him on the sofa and Isaac hugs him when his scent smells too much like sadness and Boyd sees Danny’s face light up with the thought of the fact that even if he doesn’t have Ethan, he is surrounded by and completely loved by his friends.

He stops pacing and joins Jackson and Lydia in the library after that.

Scott and Allison become even closer after death, if that’s even possible. They spend long evenings on the loveseat in the front room, their arms curled around each other, whispering in each other’s ears words of comfort when it gets too much.

Death suits them, Boyd guesses. No family codes or werewolf dynamics to tear them apart again.

And then, Boyd looks down at Erica as she sidles up to him and takes his hand and sits in his lap and kisses him when it gets dark outside or when it just gets too hard. He looks at her when she laughs at one of Stiles’ jokes, when she gives Derek a brotherly hug or when she listens to Isaac’s worries. And he wonders how he ever got so lucky.

He wonders how he would have reacted if they hadn’t have been claimed by whatever destroyed the pack at the same time, how he would have coped without her by his side the whole time, whispering that she loved him and at least they were together. He looks at Scott and Allison, Stiles and Derek, Isaac and Cora and wonders how they weren’t torn apart.

Boyd thinks of the days when he was alone, sat in the BHHS cafeteria and watching. He takes Erica’s hand and kisses her and thinks that if this is eternity and he gets to spend it by the side of the love of his life and his friends, it won’t be half as bad as those lonely days.

It’s like that – they get through death, somehow.

.

One day, about two months after her death, Lydia is shocked out of her concentration on the book in front of her by the sound of a car pulling up outside the Hale house. She doesn’t need werewolf senses to know that every other member of the pack is immediately full on alert. She rushes to the window that overlooks the driveway and sees the Sheriff climb out of his cruiser and a minute later, Melissa McCall pulls up.

They all quickly gather in the entrance hall.

Stiles and Scott look sick to their stomach. Everyone else looks saddened, yet faintly concerned.

They all stand stock-still as the parents walk up the steps to the house and the Sheriff turns Stiles’ spare key in the lock, before entering the grandiose entrance hall littered with shafts of sunlight that swirl with dust motes. The first gust of fresh air that she’s felt in two months caresses Lydia’s face and for a minute, she’s consumed by the urge to try and run out of the house and into the woods, to feel the ground beneath her feet and the sunlight on her face. But she knows it’s impossible – it’s not the doors that are holding them inside the house, it’s something else – a greater power, something they can’t control.

Melissa and John’s eyes sweep over the hall and bypass the assembled pack. Lydia breathes out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. She guesses that that confirms it – they’re ghosts, they can’t be seen by anyone other than each other.

She looks over at Stiles, who is trembling and shaking as though he’s about to collapse and Scott, who is supressing a gut-wrenching sob. She watches how Derek curls his hand around Stiles and Allison clutches Scott’s arm. She closes her eyes and imagines if this is how her parents look now.

Melissa and John look – well, they look pretty much broken. They look thinner and pale, tired and wearied. They look distraught. As Melissa eyes the staircase above them, her face crumples. Scott starts to cry in earnest.

John drops the newspaper he’s been holding and envelopes Melissa in a hug, muttering in her ear as his own eyes glisten with unshed tears.

Lydia feels like she’s intruding on a private moment. She stares at the carpeted floor beneath her feet and she realises, for the first time, that this is it. She is dead.

She’s been dead for two months but this is the first time she realises it and all it entails. Somewhere out there, a patch of land is dedicated to her and her body lies, decaying beneath the surface. Somewhere out there, a gleaming tombstone announces to the world that she was eighteen years old at her time of death. Somewhere out there, her mother and her father are mourning the loss of their daughter

Across the room, Stiles sobs into Derek’s shoulder and Scott is sat dazedly on the floor, clutching Allison’s hand like it’s a life raft.

Eventually, Melissa and John break apart.

“I just can’t quite believe they’re gone,” Melissa breathes, her eyes red and her breathing erratic.

“I know,” John replies, his voice quaking, “I thought it would help if we came here – we both know that our kids spent some of their happiest days in this house.”

“I wonder what’s going to happen to it,” Melissa wonders aloud.

“Well, since Derek didn’t leave behind a will, it technically should just go on the market and the county will probably take control of their property. But, I doubt anyone will want to buy it, not when two people died in its walls and all the media attention that surrounded it.” John replies, his eyes casting sadly around the building.

His gaze soon lands on the patch at the bottom of the stairs where Stiles’ body was found. His face seems to crumple even further with the thought that he’s gazing at his son’s final resting place.

“Parents should never outlive their children,” Melissa whispers, her eyes falling to the same spot.

“At least we have each other,” John says, “and at least we knew them for eighteen years and at least they were happy.”

Melissa nods and the pair descend into silence, the only noise Lydia can hear is the stifled sobs of Scott and Stiles.

After what feels like an eternity of heavy silence, John takes Melissa by the arm and leads her gently towards the door. “Let’s go home,” he says, his voice filled with sadness.

The door shuts behind them and the two cars pull away and suddenly, Scott and Stiles are in each other’s arms, sobbing into one another’s shoulders about brotherhood and their parents. Everyone else looks faintly shaken.

Lydia suddenly realises that she is crying, that there are tears coursing down her face.

She shuts her eyes and for the first time, dares to imagine what life is like in a world without Lydia Martin. A world without the pack. She wonders whether her parents will move on. Whether the people at school still talk in hushed whispers. She wonders if people will always remember them.

Somewhere out there, there are eleven freshly dug graves, dozens of parents mourning and ten empty seats in classrooms at school; and for the first time, Lydia realises the true significance of what the dead leave behind.

.

After the emotional trauma caused by the parents’ arrival, none of them can rest that night. Jackson realises with a start that it’s the first time any of them have really considered life outside their little bubble in the Hale house; the first time they’ve actually stopped to think that they’re _dead._

He supposes it’s understandable that they all forget about the newspaper John dropped.

Jackson has been taking a break from researching with Lydia when he goes to the entrance hall and sees the paper, dated only yesterday, lying on the ground. He picks it up and the first thing that catches his eye is a massive black and white picture of the pack on the front page. Jackson remembers the day it was taken with enormous clarity. It had been July 4th and they had all gathered at Scott’s house for a massive barbeque, when Melissa had declared she’d wanted a picture of all the pack together, so they could look back on it when they were old and grey.

The irony stings a little bit.

Melissa had taken a posed picture and then a picture which they hadn’t known was being taken at the time, which appears on the front of the newspaper. It’s natural: some of them are chatting and Allison’s head is thrown back in laughter. Jackson feels an inexplicable need to curl up and cry – they looked so young and happy, unaware that every single figure in the photograph would be dead within a year.

“Guys,” Jackson calls, and suddenly the pack converge on him from all corners of the house. Jackson points a silent finger at the photograph and they all read the accompanying article.

**Beacon Hills Mystery Solved?**

_Yesterday, the two month mystery surrounding the deaths of eleven young friends, whose ages ranged from 16-25 was effectively ended by a police statement, which declared that the deaths were unconnected and unsuspicious._

_The deaths, which have been coined simply ‘The Beacon Hills Mystery’, whipped up a nationwide media frenzy due to the bizarre and unbelievable circumstances surrounding the victims._

_The main suspicion of the public was the victims themselves and the fact that all eleven were part of an extremely tight friendship group which had been completely inseparable and that no-one beside this group has perished. Secondly, the proximity of the deaths was seen as dubious, due to the fact that the timeframe in which they all died was exactly a month._

_Despite all deaths appearing as accidents, much of Beacon Hills feared the work of a mass murderer, like the murders that infamously plagued the town only a year and a half ago, before BHHS English teacher Jennifer Blake was found to be the perpetrator._

_The issued statement, however, suggests that these deaths were just a series of ill-fated accidents._

_Stanislaw “Stiles” Stilinski (17) was the first of the group to perish, as he tripped down the stairs at the Hale residence on the morning of April 3 rd and broke his neck. His friends found his body after returning to the home owned by Derek Hale from a run, yet the coroner’s report suggests that Stilinski died around an hour before their return._

_Tragically, Jackson Whittemore (17), Danny Mahaelani (18) and Lydia Martin (18) died on the return journey from Stilinski’s funeral, when Whittemore’s car collided with a truck and promptly caught fire. All three were pronounced dead at the scene and the driver of the other vehicle vehemently insists that this was an accident and that Whittemore appeared to “lose control” of the car, although this is unconfirmed by other witnesses._

_On April 18 th, Allison Argent (18) was in the Beacon Hills Preserve practising archery, when she suffered from a heart attack. Her body was found on the 19th, after father Chris Argent raised the alarm when she did not return home, yet the Gazette has learned that she died instantaneously. An inside source also reveals that medical staff were baffled by the sudden and unexpected death of someone so healthy, yet ruled that it was probably caused by faulty genes._

_Only two days later, both Scott McCall (18) and Isaac Lahey (17) tragically died in the fire that promptly claimed the McCall house, whilst Ms. Melissa McCall was working the nightshift at Beacon Hills Hospital, where she is a nurse. The fire was caused by an electrical fault and both boys were found with an unusually high dosage of Halcion in their systems, the medication commonly used to treat insomnia and night terrors. It has been ruled, however, that the cause of death was suffocation and hence, neither deaths were treated as suspicious._

_The death with the most suspicion surrounding it is that of Derek Hale (25), legal guardian to both Isaac Lahey and Cora Hale. On the eve of April 27 th whilst in the recently renovated Hale house, he was struck by a bullet through the heart which instantly killed him. Sister Cora Hale was present at the time of death and said that she didn’t see the gunman, yet the bullet found was likely from a hunting rifle and seemed to have been doused in aconite, suggesting that this was a hunting trip gone wrong._

_The next day, teens Erica Reyes (17) and Vernon Boyd (18) were at Beacon Hills High School, emptying the lockers of their friends when they decided to sit on the stands next to the lacrosse field. Tragically, the stands collapsed whilst the couple were seated and both perished. The structure was fairly new and there was no evidence of rust, which puzzled experts, before they put the incident down to a structural fault, as the main supporting beam was found to have snapped clean in half._

_Bizarrely, exactly one month after the death of Stiles Stilinski, the last member of this tight circle of friends was killed in the Preserve. Cora Hale (16) was the last remaining member of the Hale family and was killed by what is likely to be a mountain lion on May 3 rd. The majority of the Hale family perished in the infamous fire at their home in January 2005, with only four survivors (the late Cora and Derek; Peter Hale, who was killed by a cave-in at nephew Derek’s flat in 2013; Laura Hale who, oddly, was also killed in an animal attack in the Preserve in 2011). The brutal attack rendered Cora with severe injuries to her torso, the cause of death being blood-loss from these injuries, although major organs such as her heart and liver were also ruptured. Her body was found by runners on the morning of May 4th, on one of the most frequented trails through the woodland._

_After the rumours of the recovery of Hale’s body from the forest began to circulate, suspicion and fear was rife in Beacon Hills, which shortly spread across the whole of America, as nationwide newspapers began to pick the story up._

_One of the most confusing and upsetting things about this case is the fact that every one of the victims was part of the same friendship group, as they all attended (with the exception of Derek Hale) Beacon Hills High School. “Scott and Stiles have been best friends since elementary school,” an anonymous pupil of Beacon Hills High told the Gazette, “Allison and Lydia were best friends and so were Danny and Jackson. Isaac, Erica and Boyd were very close as well. Scott and Allison were in a relationship, as were Jackson and Lydia, and Boyd and Erica. They were all inseparable at school – they ate lunch together every single day and spent their whole lives hanging out. Derek was Isaac’s legal guardian, so they hung out at his house a lot and they were really good friends with him. When Cora joined BHHS last year, she automatically became part of the group – all eleven of them used to be seen at the diner and all over town. It’s weird to think that every single member of that group passed away in such a short space of time. And only them.”_

_The closeness of all the victims was inexplicable for investigators to begin with, and was one of the main reasons such a storm was whipped up around these deaths._

_“It is utterly preposterous to say that these deaths can possibly be mere accidents,” Beacon Hills resident Susan Hastings said after the official confirmation of Cora Hale’s death, “the odds of such a tight-knit group of friends dying in such close proximity have got to be practically nothing. There must be something else going on.”_

_Despite the apparent unconnected nature of these deaths, this view was replicated across much of the nation, with residents of Beacon Hills fearing a serial killer on the loose and conspiracy theories gathering momentum on the internet._

_An investigation was promptly conducted by the Beacon Hills Police Department, led by Deputy Jordan Parrish in the place of Sheriff John Stilinski, who has been on leave since his son, Stiles, was the first victim in this string of deaths. Eventually a statement was made yesterday (May 29 th), contradicting the theories that had been whipped up._

_“After much investigation, examination of the bodies and leading experts’ advice,” Parrish said, in a press conference, “we have drawn the conclusion that these deaths are unconnected and were simply tragic accidents. Although the identity of Derek Hale’s shooter is yet to be identified, we can confidently rule that there is not a killer at work in Beacon Hills and that this is simply unfortunate coincidence. Our thoughts are with the families of the deceased and we hope that you will endeavour to show them the privacy and respect needed to come to terms with these losses.”_

_Much of America still remains unconvinced by the conclusions drawn. In fact, one hour after the press release, both ‘The Beacon Hills Mystery’ and ‘not a coincidence’ trended worldwide on Twitter, as much of the public commented on their disbelief over the proximity of the deaths and the closeness of the victims, stating that there must have been a greater force at work. This was again denied by the police yesterday evening._

_The identity of Hale’s assassin is still to be caught, though._

_So, is this it? Is this finally the end of the two-month long mystery that has captured the fears and interests of America? Is this simply, as it has been found, an utterly unpredictable and disastrous coincidence? Or, are the theorists on the Internet correct – is there perhaps something else involved?_

_These questions are currently unanswerable, yet what_ is _known is that these losses have left the close community of Beacon Hills reeling. All of the staff at the Gazette send their condolences and best wishes to the families of the lost._

_A memorial service for all of the deceased is to be held at Beacon Hills High School on June 3 rd._

As everyone stops reading, they all lift their heads up and gaze at each other in resignation and disbelief.

“We trended?” Danny asks in shock, “On Twitter?”

“Well, I guess we’re all famous,” Erica breathes and a ghost of laughter rings round the room.

It’s nervous and hesitant, but eventually the snicker spreads round the room and the newspaper is dropped on the floor as they double over with laughter.

Jackson smiles to himself and he guesses that death isn’t really as drab as he always thought it would be.

.

After the initial shock that is his Dad’s visit and finding the newspaper, things calm down a lot.

Yes, Stiles still has panic attacks when he thinks of his Dad, the last surviving Stilinski and sometimes awakes from nightmares in which the Sheriff tells him that he is all alone and that it’s all _Stiles’_ fault, but it kind of gets better. He comforts himself with the thought that his Dad has Melissa, who is going through the same thing.

When he awakes from nightmares, it hurts like hell but it doesn’t feel as bad as it could, because as he chokes out a sob, Derek’s warm hands find him in the dark and hold him and his voice thrums with understanding and comfort.

He doesn’t really know when Stiles-and-Derek becomes a thing. He guesses that across the years, their mutual distrust and dislike soon turned to alliance, which became begrudging affection, which became companionship. Back when he was still alive, Stiles realises that he managed to slowly chip away at the shell that was Derek’s grief and self-hatred. He managed to chip away at it with his ability to make Derek smile and his belief in his Alpha and his resolute trust of Derek and being the one he could talk to about the grief of losing a family.

Six days before his eighteenth birthday, Stiles had come over to the Hale house and sat with Derek as he made Mexican for dinner for himself, Isaac and Cora. They’d got into a disagreement about something really menial like who was a better Spiderman, when Derek pressed Stiles against the kitchen counter and kissed him on the lips, his breath tasting like spices and desire and coming home.

It’s kind of tragic that he had died the very next day.

But now, they’re dead and of course, Stiles misses his Dad and lacrosse and video games and being alive and he probably always will, but at least he has Derek; he has someone to hold when it gets too tough and someone to mess around with.

Stiles thinks it’s kind of the same for everyone else: they’re all saddened by the life they have left behind but optimistic about the eternity that is to come.

They have each other.

Lydia stops researching and admits that she can’t find anything that will actually help. They stop trying to figure out where they are and they start living. Even whilst dead. Ironic, Stiles knows. But, true.

They start getting into the habit of sitting on the sofas in the living room every night, swapping stories of their lives and what made them happy.

Stiles talks about his Mom and how much she meant to him. Derek tells them about being a kid and the traditions of the Hale family. Scott tells them about all the animals he helped to heal and how good it felt. Boyd talks about the first time he realised he belonged. Allison says something about looking at her friends and realising that she had people to protect. Erica talks about the feeling of being invincible and finding Boyd. Danny discusses Ethan and everything they said they’d always do. Isaac talks about feeling like he had worth and feeling like part of a family. Lydia smiles and reminisces about the first time she opened a Chemistry book and felt her curiosity being captured. Cora laughs with stories of growing up with Derek and Laura, the games they used to play and the stories they used to tell their Mom. Jackson closes his eyes and talks wistfully about how _free_ he felt on the lacrosse field.

It’s comforting sitting together side by side, speaking of the days which brought them the most joy. They share tales of their first impressions of each other and stupid things, like when Danny didn’t know about werewolves and was _convinced_ that Stiles was part of some governmental organisation solving a massive mystery or when Derek and Scott didn’t speak to each other for a week because they fell out over which type of orange juice was better.

They’ve always been inseparable and _pack_ , but in the months that follow their death, it becomes even more overt. They become extensions of one another, able to sense each other’s emotions and always knowing exactly what to say. It’s as if a thrumming line has been drawn between them all, connecting them at the heart and binding them closer than ever before.

They line draws them all together and stretches on, unblinking for the rest of eternity, just waiting for them to play it out.

.

“What did you guys think about when you died?” Erica asks abruptly one night, as they sit in companionable silence.

Derek’s head snaps up, as he remembers those four seconds of complete agony before the Wolfsbane stopped his heart and everything went white. Those four seconds of wishing he could be there a little bit longer.

“I remember falling,” Stiles says, after a moment of silence, “I remember slipping and then flying through the air. I think I panicked at first and felt worried for everyone I would leave behind but just before I hit the ground, I remember feeling free.”

“It was peaceful,” Cora murmurs, “I remember thinking that my body was going back to where it belonged and I thought of Laura and I thought of the other side.”

“Curiosity,” Lydia says, “I remember wondering what great adventure was coming next.”  
  
“I think I thought about whether I’d see everyone again,” Allison recalls.

The room descends into silence again, as they all relive their last moments.

“What about you, Derek?” Cora pipes up, “After the bullet hit you, you said ‘sorry’. I remember that I wished I could know what for.”

Derek shuts his eyes.

 “I’m not sure, really. A combination of things. At first, I guess I was sorry for leaving everyone that was left behind. I felt like I’d neglected my duties as an Alpha by dying and leaving you to fend for yourselves. I felt sorry that I’d _let_ you all die before me – I was supposed to be your protector. And I wasn’t there when you most needed me. That was a massive part of it. But I guess I was also saying sorry for myself. I’d been through hell and back when I was alive and it kind of felt, before it all kicked off, that I had finally achieved happiness. I had my pack and I had a family and I had my family home and Stiles and a job and a _life_. And just like that, it ended. I was partially saying sorry to myself, sorry that the happiness couldn’t have lasted for longer. I didn’t know that I’d find it on the other side, as well.”

He opens his eyes.

The pack are staring at him, with expressions of happiness and sadness and love. Stiles squeezes his hand and leans into his shoulder

“You idiot, Derek,” Erica says, “of course no one blamed you for us all dying. You didn’t _let_ us die – we just _did_. Don’t be such a bloody martyr.”  
  
She finishes her sentence by engulfing him in a bear hug and soon, the whole of the pack are crowded on the sofa, hugging each other and crying and telling each other how much they love each other and how they’re all so thankful that they’re pack.

Derek shuts his eyes and remembers the days after Laura, when the loneliness sometimes got so much he sometimes wished he was the one in the ground.

He thanks whatever deity is above them that he gets to spend his eternity with the people he loves the most.

.

The peace they manage to build up is disturbed one morning by the sound of two cars pulling up outside the house for the second time since their deaths.

Erica breathes in deeply, letting the scents of the unfamiliar man and the woman fill her nose. She doesn't recognise either of them.

From the looks on the faces of the rest of the pack, they don't know either.

They're both a bit more crude about their methods of getting into the home, smashing one of the front panels of glass of the front door.

"Trust you to want to meet here," the man sighs, shaking his head.

"Kind of poetic, don't you think? Meeting in the house of the pack we've torn apart?"

"Whatever," the man scoffs, "about my payment?"

"You get half of what we offered. I'm convinced that you succeeded purely out of luck in about fifty percent of the cases," the woman says firmly.

Erica looks round at the faces of the rest of them in horror, realisation slowly dawning.

_"Luck?_ You think it was luck? You think it was luck when I convinced one of our trainee hunters to pose as a handyman to fix the upstairs window in this house and then loosen all the carpet on the upper stairs so that the Sheriff's son would trip on it and fall down the stairs? Do you think it was luck when we paid off that truck driver to collide with that boy's Porsche on the way back from their friend's funeral? Was it luck when we poisoned that girl's food - that traitorous hunter that _protects_ the wolves she's supposed to kill - so that it would stop her heart and then force that witch to remove all traces of it from her body?”

The guy pauses for breath, but soon restarts his tirade of anger. The inhabitants of the house take a collective breath in.

“Was I just lucky when I switched those two poor, mourning boys' Halcion tablets with Wolfsbane and then stepped up the dosage so much that they would be effectively knocked out and untraceable? Luck when we crept in and tampered with the electricity to set the house alight as they slept soundly in their beds? Simply luck when we shot a Wolfsbane bullet through the heart of the Alpha as he talked to his sister? Luck when we sawed through the supporting beam of the bleachers so that it would collapse when the Werewolf couple sat on it? Was it luck when I convinced that Omega that the Hale brat had killed his mate so he would kill her in the forest that she came from? Of course it wasn't _luck_ \- careful planning went into every single one of those deaths. I did exactly what you wanted - created enough of a media storm to warn off any werewolves that would think off crossing us but made them all look like an accident," the hunter spits.

"Derek Hale's death was sloppy. It's still suspicious and they're trying to find the hitman," the woman insists.

"That was purposeful - to send a message and to ensure that all other werewolves would know we were after them, to let them know what they were facing. They think it's a hunt gone wrong, anyway. Don't realise we got exactly what we wanted."

The woman looks at him thoughtfully, as though she's not considering paying off the guy she got to murder an entire pack, "you fight a good case. Payment in full."

"Thank you," the guy says, reaching out his hand to shake on it.

"They deserved to die," the woman says, as she exits the Building, "they all do. Every single werewolf and werewolf sympathiser."

 "I quite agree, ma'am," the guys fading voice replies, as he climbs into the car

The cars drive away and finally, oh God finally, Erica realises the reason behind her demise.

She wonders why it doesn’t make her feel any better.

.

“The forest is like our ecosystem,” Lydia remarks that very evening, as they’re curled up numbly in the living room of the Hale house, thinking about how they _truly_ died.

Danny looks up from the window he’s been staring out of, having been contemplating the true nature of his death. Did he have any realisation at the time that the driver had purposefully smashed into him? Did this change anything?

“I was just thinking of what that guy said about Cora ‘coming from the forest’ and it got me thinking,” Lydia continues, “If you think about it, our story – this pack’s story effectively started in the forest. It was where Scott got bitten. It started us on this path and by that sense; it led us to the end. We can all trace our roots back to it: if Scott and Stiles hadn’t been in the forest then Scott wouldn’t have got bitten and therefore, there would be no _pack_ and none of us would be friends in the way we are. All of our roots crisscross and diverge and converge but if you trace them back to their beginnings, they are amongst the trees and the creatures of this wood. It’s our ecosystem: it birthed us all and when we died, I reckon we all went back to it. Cora, Derek, Stiles, Allison; you all died in this forest and our spirits have been trapped in its midst. Our story can be traced back to its leafy floor but so can its end. It took back what it gave and that’s natural – that’s probably the most natural process in the world.”

Danny thinks of Ethan and how when Jennifer Blake killed him and his twin, they probably lay back on the ground and felt the blood drain out of him. Danny closes his eyes and pictures Ethan’s body, buried in the forest and how it has probably given life to so many creatures and plants and helped the woodland thrive and live. He pictures Ethan’s smile and his laugh and the way his fingers and veins must have connected with the Earth when he lay back on his deathbed.

He wonders whether Ethan felt the thrum of nature running between his fingertips and the soil beneath his body. Whether Ethan felt how connected they were and realised that his death was natural – he was going back to where he had come from and where he belonged.

Danny hopes he did.

This thought is interrupted by Lydia opening her mouth again and speaking, defiance in her eyes and passion in her voice.

“Yeah,” she says “maybe it’s nice knowing that it wasn’t just my time to go and that my death was planned – or maybe it’s a horrible thought, Maybe it’s comforting to think that our deaths are finally solved – but maybe that’s worrying. That’s the thing – we just _don’t_ know. And so what if we do? Do you think it’s going to change anything? We’re dead and our deaths will always be seen as bizarre coincidences. The people who organised it will probably all walk free for the rest of their lives. So what? It’s going to make us _undead_ and the point of it all was never to avenge whoever the fuck did this to us. I think the point is to learn to come to peace with it and you know what – I _am_ at peace with it. I’ve spent so long wanting to know all the answers and I’ve got half of them now and that’s not what’s making me feel any better. The most important answer I’ve got is how death happens all the damn time and the woods have seen so much of it and it’s like a cycle and we’re part of that forest, now, because we’re dead and that’s okay – it’s just a part of that very cycle. I’m okay with it – I’m at peace.”

A murmur of agreement runs round the living room and Danny stares out of the window to the tips of the trees he can see stretching for miles around – to their ecosystem.

To the place which started this journey and the place which kind of ended it.

Danny pictures Ethan’s body and then he pictures his own, with vines twisting round it and with its bones exposed and touching, connecting with the Earth and that feels _natural_ to him.

Danny realises he’s at peace with it too and he gazes around the room, where every single other person is nodding in ascent.

Danny looks round at his friends and he realises with a start that they’re all fading to whiteness. The look of shock is replicated in their eyes as well.

He wonders whether this is oblivion and shuts his eyes.

.

They close their eyes and they open them again, and they’re stood amongst the tall trees of the forest where Isaac guesses it all began.

He watches how Stiles clings to his mother like he’s never letting her go; how Cora and Derek are immersed in a sea of dark-haired people, submerged by laughter and finally, with a family again; he sees Boyd introducing Erica to a small girl, and then holding her in his arms; Jackson finally meets his biological parents and they hug him and then Lydia and tell him that they’re so proud of him for everything; Danny and Ethan reunite and fall into each other, laughing and recalling those days of teenage trysts; Allison hugs her Mom and she shakes Scott’s hand and tells him she’s thankful that he protected her daughter.

He watches his pack, his friends, his _family_ filled with the joy of long-awaited reunification.

Across the clearing, Camden raises his arm in salute to the brother he left behind. Isaac raises his hand in a return wave, before Cora takes it and leads him into the forest, whooping at the feeling of the ground beneath her bare feet and the way the breeze feels on her skin.

They all run with them, the rest of the pack. They all run like it’s another full moon and they’re back outside the Hale house, waiting for the pull of the moon beneath their skin to subside. They run through the forest which birthed them and led them back to the Earth; the forest which they are all just as much a part of as the leaves on the trees and the creatures that call it their home.

They are back where they belong; their bones and veins thrumming in harmony with the whoosh of the wind and their limbs connecting to the Earth beneath their feet.

They have eternity.

This is their oblivion.

**Author's Note:**

> If it's unclear, they're in the afterlife at the end. 
> 
> Told ya it would be happy (ish).
> 
> Hit me up with any questions on [tumblr.](http://alaricsaltzmans.tumblr.com)


End file.
